{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/autonomous-flights-inside-narrow-tunnels","title":"Autonomous Flights inside Narrow Tunnels","arxiv_id":"2505.19657","date":"2025-05-26","proceeding":null,"authors":["Luqi Wang","Yan Ning","Hongming Chen","Peize Liu","Yang Xu","Hao Xu","Ximin Lyu","Shaojie Shen"],"abstract":"Multirotors are usually desired to enter confined narrow tunnels that are barely accessible to humans in various applications including inspection, search and rescue, and so on. This task is extremely challenging since the lack of geometric features and illuminations, together with the limited field of view, cause problems in perception; the restricted space and significant ego airflow disturbances induce control issues. This paper introduces an autonomous aerial system designed for navigation through tunnels as narrow as 0.5 m in diameter. The real-time and online system includes a virtual omni-directional perception module tailored for the mission and a novel motion planner that incorporates perception and ego airflow disturbance factors modeled using camera projections and computational fluid dynamics analyses, respectively. Extensive flight experiments on a custom-designed quadrotor are conducted in multiple realistic narrow tunnels to validate the superior performance of the system, even over human pilots, proving its potential for real applications. Additionally, a deployment pipeline on other multirotor platforms is outlined and open-source packages are provided for future developments.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19657v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19657v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"autonomous-flights-inside-narrow-tunnels","repo_url":"https://github.com/hkust-aerial-robotics/fint","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}